By Bennett Borofka, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
Nicholas Doane, Senior Sales Engineer – LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor

Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers operate workloads that span multiple AWS Regions, data centers and cloud providers. Finding a scalable, unified tool to monitor workloads before, during and after a cloud migration is difficult for AWS customers. LogicMonitor (LM) provides a SaaS-based observability platform that automatically discovers AWS resources, on premises data center infrastructure and other cloud provider resources. This gives customers a comprehensive view of real-time performance metrics and logs, such as server CPU utilization or Amazon RDS database logs. In this blog, you will learn how LogicMonitor scales for multiple monitoring environments, assists with cloud migrations, and optimizes cloud costs.

Monitoring multiple workload environments

Across each workload environment discussed in this article, LogicMonitor provides visibility with built-in integrations:

• AWS cloud: AWS customers use native services like Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Grafana or AWS Billing to view real-time metrics, logs and cost insights across hundreds of services. LogicMonitor monitors a range of common services like Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC and Amazon RDS, but also serverless and generative AI services like AWS Lambda and Amazon Bedrock.
• Hybrid: Outside of AWS, customers have workloads that remain in their data center, for data residency, lower latency, or local data processing requirements. LogicMonitor offers end-to-end visibility of these workloads, including monitoring support for hybrid services like AWS Direct Connect and AWS Database Migration Service. LogicMonitor offers thousands of integrations for data center infrastructure technologies, giving a single pane of view for compute, database and network resources in the cloud and on premises.
• Multicloud: LogicMonitor offers native monitoring support for other cloud providers, allowing customers to monitor other cloud compute, storage, and networking services end-to-end.

LogicMonitor supports these environments with a SaaS-based platform, providing:

• Over 3,000 integrations (LogicModules) for popular compute, network, storage, application vendors such as HPE, Cisco, Linux, NetApp, Oracle, Microsoft Office 365. Customers access the latest integrations through LM Exchange which are continuously updated and released.
• Out-of-the box support for over 70 AWS services using service APIs, Amazon CloudWatch’s GetMetricData API and from Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
• Built-in AIOps capabilities for analysis, correlation, and anomaly detection.
• Monitoring of other cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
• Unified Dashboards, Reports, Topology Mapping, Alerts, and Cost Optimization across all workload environments.
• Built-in Workflow Integrations with ticketing and notification systems like Jira, ServiceNow, Autotask, and Slack.

Monitoring scalability

Customer with hybrid and multicloud use cases use multiple monitoring tools with siloed operations that lack integration. As IT infrastructure increases in scale and complexity, using a unified observability platform that keeps pace with change while reducing mean time to repair (MTTR) becomes increasingly important. Legacy, agent-based monitoring systems lead to sprawling software agent deployments, incurring maintenance overhead. The complexity and dynamic nature of cloud architectures make it difficult to maintain up-to-date visibility. Managing on premises tools presents their own operational overhead, requiring database capacity planning and recurring server patching. LogicMonitor’s SaaS platform scales automatically, allowing customers to focus more on workload performance and less on monitoring tool management.

LogicMonitor combines advanced automation with API-based cloud monitoring, providing deep and broad observability into workloads running in AWS. The LogicMonitor Collector is an application that runs on a Linux or Windows server within a customer’s network. It uses standard monitoring protocols (such as SNMP, WMI, and Syslog) to intelligently discover and monitor infrastructure and applications. For customers that require monitoring of advanced server metrics such as memory utilization, the Collector can optionally be deployed to Amazon EC2 to monitor multiple instances in an Amazon VPC. Depending on the Collector’s server size and type of resources monitored, a Collector typically installs within minutes, can monitor hundreds of resources, and be configured for high availability. A Collector deployed on premises requires outbound TCP port 443 (Secure HTTP) to LogicMonitor’s data centers for continuous data collection. In AWS, a Collector deployed to an EC2 instance needs its VPC security group configured with the same outbound access in addition to an Internet gateway or NAT device allowing Internet access.

Monitoring cloud migrations

Rehost and replatform are two strategies customers use for migration to AWS. LogicModules from LogicMonitor provide end-to-end monitoring, giving full visibility into the infrastructure performance, whether it is running on premises or in AWS. Customers use LogicMonitor to monitor entire application performance before, during and after a migration to assess results.

Common challenges customers encounter when migrating workloads to AWS are:

1. Pre-migration planning: Accurate collection of data on interdependent infrastructure and applications is essential to prevent migration mishaps. To ensure a smooth migration process without disruptions to business productivity, understanding and documenting the functional components of the application infrastructure is crucial. Customers gather detail baseline metrics prior to migration to validate application performance during migration activities. This includes network latency, bandwidth utilization, compute metrics, database performance, and others, depending on the workload.
2. Undergoing migration: While actively migrating systems to the cloud, maintaining business productivity is difficult; unforeseen surprises will cause unpredicted impacts. To ensure a smooth migration and prompt issue resolution, engineers need timely notifications of unexpected events during planned maintenance, along with relevant context. Unexpected resource utilization is important, but so are application error rates, high network latency, and metric or log anomalies. These problems will stop a migration in its tracks if not resolved quickly.
3. Post-migration evaluation: Customers conduct complex analysis to validate workload performance and optimize costs. Sizing cloud resources that previously ran on premises requires adjustments post-migration. When evaluating workload performance, it is essential to consider both user experience and future performance and capacity requirements. Performing cost optimization is critical to ensuring the realization of the migration’s ROI. Customers must optimize cloud costs promptly and efficiently to avoid high operating expenses.

These challenges lead to unplanned costs, risks to business continuity, and delayed migration projects, causing additional negative impacts to the organization.

While planning and preparing for migration, LogicMonitor speeds up the process of collecting necessary information through Active Discovery. LogicMonitor continually discovers changes in data center and cloud environments, identifying critical services, and mapping relationships between resources. LogicMonitor’s Resource Explorer summarizes monitored resources with color-coded alerts and filtering capabilities, allowing users to identify and analyze specific resources or issues, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – LogicMonitor Resource Explorer, showing detailed alert for a backup device

During live migration activities, LogicMonitor helps teams understand the status of resources in real-time. LogicMonitor auto-generates alerts based on the health, performance, and availability of all resources. Customers use dashboards to associate infrastructure components and KPIs with logical business services, giving users context, impact, and the importance of alerts. LogicMonitor displays this information across AWS, hybrid, and multicloud environments as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Combined AWS, hybrid and multicloud workload performance in a LogicMonitor Dashboard

After migrating IT infrastructure resources to AWS, customers begin workload performance validation and cloud cost optimization activities. LogicMonitor allows customers to visualize cloud and on premises workload performance metrics side-by-side, simplifying post-migration workload performance validation, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 – Comparing VM performance before and after migration in a LogicMonitor Dashboard

Multicloud cost optimization

LogicMonitor Cost Optimization allows customers to visualize spend in a single view, to see deeper into your AWS and Microsoft Azure bill for quick insights and tighter cost control. This allows customers to visualize their bill with multiple pre-configured tabs and widgets, powered by Amazon QuickSight Embedded (Figure 4).

Figure 4 – Multicloud Billing Dashboard with LogicMonitor Cost Optimization

AWS customers use Cost Optimization to right-size their cloud spend with LogicMonitor-provided recommendations (Figure 5) for Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS, each with projected dollar savings based on many days of monitored, historical data:

• Idle Amazon EC2 instances: Identify instances when average CPU utilization is less than 5% for the past two days.
• Underutilized Amazon EC2 instances: Identify instances when maximum CPU utilization is less than 40% for the past two days.
• Unattached Amazon EBS volumes: Identify volumes that are not assigned to an Amazon EC2 instance.

Figure 5 – AWS Recommendations Dashboard with LogicMonitor Cost Optimization

Conclusion

In this blog, we showed how LogicMonitor provides workload performance metrics and logs across AWS, hybrid and multicloud environments. LogicMonitor scales easily via its SaaS and Collector-based architectures, assists with discovery and validation of workload migrations to the cloud, and gives comprehensive multicloud cost optimization dashboards and recommendations.

LogicMonitor offers its platform to customers as a SaaS subscription, also providing Professional Services direct or through partners.

LogicMonitor is available on AWS Marketplace, where customers can request a private offer or demo. LogicMonitor also offers a 14-day free guided trial.

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LogicMonitor – AWS Partner Spotlight

LogicMonitor is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner and AWS Competency Partner that provides a SaaS-based performance monitoring platform for cloud and on premises resources.

Contact LogicMonitor | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace